My Health Record could have been great

Martyn Goddard explains why he, reluctantly, opted out of online system

THE Federal Government’s electronic health record could — if it had been planned properly — have saved thousands of lives every year. But that long-held hope has been all but destroyed by the Government’s sheer administrative ineptitude.

A decent system is badly needed. More often than not, doctors rely on new patients for a medical history — what they are on, the doses, their allergies, the conditions they have, the treatments they’ve received. Too often the patient doesn’t know or forgets to mention something important. That can lead to misdiagnosis, harm and sometimes death.

For some 20 years successive governments, bureaucrats and committees have struggled to find solutions to the problems inherent in such a sensitive and complex enterprise. It has swallowed hundreds of millions of dollars.

The technical challenges are bad enough — but most of these can be solved by clever technicians. The much bigger problem has been privacy.

And there were always too many competing interests around those committee tables. The loud and powerful Pharmacy Guild, particularly, insisted its people should be regarded at the same level as doctors.

And so stalemate followed stalemate.

Eventually it was agreed that people would not accept the potential privacy risks to their medical information unless they had specifically signed up for it. So an opt-in system was designed and launched.

And because it was opt-in, a number of privacy concerns were glossed over. But now, clumsily, Health Minister Greg Hunt decided to change an opt-in system into opt-out, without any significant redesign. And all those privacy issues, once hidden, are now obvious to all.

That is why I, reluctantly, have opted out. So have many thousands of others.

The outcry, and a flood of opt-outs, has now prompted Mr Hunt to undertake a political fix. He had a meeting with two doctor organisations and locked them into supporting changes to address two problems but which left all the others unaltered. The Privacy Commissioner and the Consumer’s Health Forum were not invited.

And the remaining problems — those we know about — are many and serious. The third-party apps needed by mobile users were discredited when large numbers of patient records were leaked by one, HealthEngine. Rather than abandon its outsourcing to private operators, the Government opted merely to tweak its contract.

The former partners of women fleeing domestic violence can set up health records for their children, tracking their whereabouts and those of the women, potentially putting them in further danger. Insurance companies can pressure people to hand over passwords as a condition of granting a policy.

Singapore’s system was hacked and the medical records of 1.5 million people stolen. Records from Australia’s Medicare have already been sold to international criminals on the dark web.

The list goes on, growing almost every day.

If the community is to accept an opt-out system, it must be at least as secure as your bank account. No third party — including app providers — should ever be involved. The only people with access should be the doctors currently treating you. Anything else should be optin.

We badly need a system like that but the Government has spectacularly failed to deliver one. And, worse, it has poisoned — perhaps forever — the whole important, lifesaving idea.